PS won't open Sony ARW file even after it opened it once already.

Question

All of my Adobe products are kept up-to-date regularly.

I've tried opening t he file in other image viewers: Affinity, Preview, Topaz AI, and Lightroom with no issues but PS & PS Beta produce the "Unable to open file because Photoshop does not recognize file type" error message.

As my subject title indicates I initially opened the file and edited it in PS so:

-Is it something in the editing that creates the problem? i.e. I ran it through the Topaz Photo AI plugin to sharpen and denoise, however, that's part of my usual workflow so why with this (or any) particular file?

I'd love to know if anyone else is having this issue and can say how they resolved it.

Thanks in advance!

Jean

davescm · Answer

An ARW file is a raw camera file. When opening it in Photoshop, then Camera Raw will be used to open the file and make initial adjustments. If you just edited in camera raw (or Lightroom) and saved it from there would be no issue as camera raw saves its edits as a list in a separate file alongside the ARW file. However, if you carry on into Photoshop and carry out any edits in Photoshop itself, including using plug ins, it must be saved as a file type that supports those edits within the file e.g. PSD PSB TIFF etc. If you try and edit then save it as ARW then you will be saving with an incorrect file extension as the file will not actually be an ARW raw file. Hence it will not open as such.

Dave

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